They say love changes everything. But time changes love.
Just how much it can change became front page news last week, when the family of retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor revealed that her husband had fallen in love with a fellow Alzheimer’s patient.
And she was happy for him.
What happens to the part of ourselves [...]

Historic handshakes between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Annapolis this week, seven long years since the last comprehensive peace talks fell apart. What it will mean this time is anyone’s guess.
And speaking of guessing: who’s the GOP presidential frontrunner now? The YouTube debate was a bumpy ride.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s Musharraf shed his uniform. The Broadway strike [...]

Birdwatchers are everywhere. They’re flocking to sanctuaries and sewage swamps, lagoons and landfills, in search of warblers, whistling ducks, saw-whet owls and peregrines.
They’re not just middle-aged men in field socks; now it’s iPod-toting teenagers, white-haired grandmas: up to 80 million Americans are answering the call to watch birds.
It’s a 400-year-old pastime, but today, with climate [...]

Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee tried, in last night’s YouTube debate, to break out of the Republican pack.
They got aggressive, especially on immigration, but also on the economy, on foreign policy, on taxes and on trade. Romney played defense. Huckabee looked like a contender.
But with no clear frontrunner, and [...]

It sounds like a sci-fi nightmare: scientists bring back to life ancient deadly viruses that once wiped out vast numbers of the human race for research purposes only, of course. And where do they go to find those extinct diseases? Deep within our own genome.
Long ago, some of the viruses that didn’t kill us got [...]

Tom Perkins, and the legendary venture capital firm he co-founded, has been a driving force in Silicon Valley for over thirty-five years. Netscape, Amazon, Google — some would say his firm built the Valley as we know it today.
When Al Gore wanted to help spark a green technology revolution, he joined up with Perkins’ and [...]

In Alan Lightman’s new novel, “Ghost,” you’re never quite sure what to believe.
But Lightman, a theoretical physicist who a decade ago gave us the bestselling novel “Einstein’s Dreams,” knows what he’s up to. He wants to explore the edges of belief — both religious and scientific.
David, his protagonist, works at a funeral home, and one [...]

The last time Israelis and Palestinians sat down at an American conference table to talk peace — seven long and bloody years ago — the Middle East was a different place.
Today, as the old adversaries meet in Annapolis, Maryland — along with the U.S. and dozens of other countries, including most of the Arab world [...]

Best-selling jazz trumpeter Chris Botti says “music that breaks your heart is the music that stays with you forever.” And that’s what he gives his listeners — sweeping jazz ballads that warm the heart and soul.
Influenced by his piano-playing mother and the legendary Miles Davis, Botti has played with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sting, [...]

It feels like we’ve seen this before: US troops make progress in Iraq, while Iraq’s political and ethnic divide appears as vast as ever.
And yet something real has happened on the ground: the terrible bloodletting brought on by the fall of Saddam has ebbed. Neighborhoods are quieter. And as promised, the first drawdown of US [...]

Here’s a callout to American fans of Indian food. After you’ve enjoyed your samosa and chicken tikka masala, and maybe a curry and some goolab jam, Chitrita Banerji wants you to know there’s a much bigger world out there.
A universe barely touched on most Indian menus in America of rich and varied cuisine from the [...]

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie LeDuff lays it down rough, in the gonzo journalism tradition of Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac.
He’s crossed the desert with Mexican immigrants, worked in cannery and hog factory, gone deep with New York fireman after 9/11.
Now, Charlie LeDuff brings us the stories of a year on the road, going deep [...]

For a ballad of ruin and loss, there is none in the American songbook with more dark power than “House of the Rising Sun.” Everybody’s sung it. Everybody knows it.
The Animals made it a big hit in the 1960s, but its roots go way back. Alan Lomax first heard it from the lips of a [...]

Bill Geist grew up deep in the Midwest, went to work in New York, then turned his eye back on the nooks and crannies and marvels of the American back road.
For twenty years now, he’s trolled the country’s narrowest highways and byways for CBS, for great tales of small town America.
And he’s found some doosies. [...]

Auden Schendler is true-blue green, a life-long environmentalist, a climate crusader, says Time magazine.
Schendler believed, with every fiber of his being, that American corporations could save the planet and reap profits at the same time. But when he put that faith to the test, he found turning green into greenbacks is harder than he thought.
Now, [...]

After World War II, some 8 million veterans came home and went to college on the GI Bill, helping create the American middle class. Now, the latest generation of vets — battle-tried in Iraq and Afghanistan — is coming home, and many are going to college.
They’ve got less help from Uncle Sam, but they are [...]

E-read all about it. On Monday, Amazon debuted its much-anticipated e-book reader — the Kindle — and set the book world abuzz.
The goals of the electronic reading device are simple: to replace bound paper, and to change the way we read and buy books. Lofty, but maybe not impossible goals, for our wired, jacked up, [...]

While the fast food nation has revolutionized America’s eating habits, another, quieter revolution has taken place at the other end of the culinary spectrum. And today, if you’re a “foodie” — as devotees of good food and cooking are called — you may have Judith Jones to thank.
When Julia Child’s first manuscript, for “Mastering the [...]

With President Bush’s popularity in a ditch, and Republicans in disarray, many Democrats on their party’s left feel their moment is now. Americans, they say, are ready to address inequality, to transform healthcare, to remake America’s image abroad — to embrace liberalism.
But what does that word, tainted by decades of abuse from the right — [...]

Human beings are nothing if not emotional animals. Jerome Kagan, one of the country’s most prominent psychologists, has spent a lifetime untangling the complexities of our brains.
Now he’s out with a fascinating new book looking at our emotions: What’s hard wired and what’s not; how gender, age, religion, nationality and class all affect our interactions [...]